In business, we almost always seem to be chasing the next big thing. Maybe it’s because new is often equated with being better or superior, but sometimes it’s essential to look at what you have and how you can improve upon it. Just like with your health, a “check up” is necessary from time to time in the help desk industry to make sure everything is working as it should. This is especially true with a solution like help desk self-service, which according to Gartner is among the top 3 priorities businesses are working on to improve their customer’s help desk experience.

Here are the key things to look at when conducting a help desk self-service assessment…

Make sure you are maximizing your use of help desk self-service – It’s easy to launch a self-service software solution only to mark some of the features as “phase 2” initiatives. However, employees get busy and dragged into new projects, and thus these initiatives never get completed. An assessment can help remind you of these forgotten features (such as adding categories to content or fully branding pages) so you implement them this time around.

Evaluate new capabilities within your help desk self-service offering – A lot of companies go through the process of setting up a self-service solution, add a bunch of content, and consider it “done”. This is exactly why an assessment is necessary! Many help desk software solutions make ongoing updates to add new features and functionality to their self-service offering, so make sure you understand what has changed since your last assessment.

Look at help desk self-service metrics to fix the customer experience – Data can be extremely valuable to identify and plug the gaps in your self-service solution. For example, if you have a lot of searches in self-service for a specific term but you have no piece of content for it, you should look to write something on the topic in the future. These data driven decisions can be important to keeping self-service experiences relevant, fresh, and also to save your company money.

Continue to experiment with new ideas for your solution – Once you’re done improving and fixing, it can be time to assess exactly what you want your self-service experience to be like. Maybe you’d like to incorporate video tutorials or enable more accurate recommended content? There are several different ways to enhance a self-service offering so brainstorm and conceptualize what will best fit the specific needs of your customers.

Plan for the next help desk self-service assessment – Once you’ve completed your assessment, don’t forget to plan the next one. This can be ideal if your brainstorming session generated a lot of good ideas so you remember to prioritize and implement them in the future. Putting these new ideas into action will only help in improving the reputation of your help desk. Some companies do an assessment every quarter, while others choose to wait six months or even a full year.